Plex Media Server on Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Plex Media Server on Cloud

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138 pointsmsh90 comments

For those wishing to use Amazon Cloud Drive with their own Plex server https://amc.ovh/ has some great instructions. I've been doing this with very little issues for a few months now.

EDIT: More up to date instructions at https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...

Wow. "Unlimited" for $60/yr. Do you think they'd be ok with me uploading my entire 12tb library? I wasn't able to find any limits in the fine print.

I have ~18TB there. No issues so far.

Some people have 1.3PB there: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xhqsk/linux_i... Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NmGQf7b.png

Plenty of people on Reddit's /r/DataHoarder have done far more than that, easily into the tens of TBs. The problems come when you upload unencrypted copyrighted content or try to download more than 1TB in a single day.

Wait, what happens if you upload unencrypted copyright content? I legally own quite a bit of that, as I suspect most people do.

Amazon has on some occasions banned users for merely uploading it: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4j5fsi/after_s...

Well-why use the service if the company can snoop through it at will? Seems to defeat the purpose of having a private data store. All you need to do to see someone's data is work for customer support at amazon.

Because the service is cheap, comes with a ton of storage and is convenient. Few average people care about their privacy online.

Well, you have a license to use the material, but that license probably wasn't written with the intent of you streaming it from someone else's server.

Hmm... there are laws allowing you to make backups of licensed content. Can you explain more about how license would forbid you from storing those backups on Amazon server?

perhaps streaming would in the law as a form of broadcast, thus storing it would be fine but as the purpose of storing in that situation is to broadcast that would be illegal (not saying that is the case, just making a reasonable scenario)

Who's to say how it's being used?

you probably didn't study the EULA

You clearly did. Can you answer my question?

Like others said you should be fine, people have stored much much more without issue. Just make sure it's all encrypted.

I've read people saying they have at least 3 times that.

I have an lifetime plex pass membership. I think it cost $120. I am not sure how they will be able to continue to offer me plex cloud, as servers which plex are paying for must be doing the transcoding. The bill for CPU must be fairly hefty if people really start to use this.

Maybe transcoding won't be needed eventually for a majority of users ? A lot of media right now exists in h264 which newer devices can anyway play. Since AV1 has broad industry support, it might be also become ubiquitous.

Most of my transcoding usage in Plex isn't for a target codec or target resolution, but for a target bitrate.

I'm pretty sure this is still a trial and they will eventually charge for it. I seem to remember reading something like that when it was first announced.

Perhaps they transcode to multiple formats/bitrates locally before upload?

That's not the case, and it would be utterly unusable for 90% of users.

This has the big limitation, at least at the moment, that the supported providers all cap out at 1 TB for any kind of reasonably-priced storage.

Google Drive business account with one person in it has unlimited storage for a very reasonable price. There's a lot of information about that on https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5kamuv/google_...

The top comment on that includes...

> edit: be warned that many people are receiving 24 hour bans utilizing their Google Drive as network attached storage with Plex.

It's also painfully slow. I've been using it for the past few months, and it rescans my library every time I access it. Half the time it shows my libraries as empty. Overall it feels very unfinished.

I figured it would be too slow for daily use for my own needs, based on my current setup. I have a Nvidia Shield TV as the Plex server and living room Plex client, with a home-built NAS running OpenMediaVault for media storage. The Shield and NAS are both connected to Gigabit Ethernet, and I occasionally run into slowdowns if I'm trying to watch in the living room, my wife is watching in the bedroom via Roku, and my sister-in-law across the city is watching via her Roku. I've narrowed it down to a saturated network, the Shield was barely breaking a sweat transcoding the files.

With that said, using the Shield as the server greatly improved our previous streaming situation. Before using the Shield, we'd struggle to maintain two good quality streams at once, whether both were local or one was local and one remote. The previous server was no slouch: Core2 Quad with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, but it seems the Shield is well qualified to handle server duties.

Which CPU was it? I doubt Plex are using the latest ffmpeg, but I saw big jumps between the i7 920, 2600k and then finally the 6800k. That said, my current Plex box is an Atom C2758, which seems to handle 1-2 streams just fine (1 direct, 1 transcode).

Core2 Quad Q8400. That machine is now being used as a Linux/BSD testbed every now and then, and it's still plenty fast enough for modern desktop duties.

The other concern the Shield mitigates is power inefficiency; that C2Q is a power hungry beast, and the entire Shield box uses less wattage at full load than the Intel CPU alone at idle.

It is still in Beta after all. The meta data loading is much slower than my server, but transcoding so far has been great.

Originally, they were going to support Amazon (who offers more storage as part of Prime), but that was dropped at some point.

Those cloud providers likely don't want to get into the business of hosting media files that go into Plex. There aren't a lot of legal ways to get TV shows and movies (the bulk of the space) into the DRM-free format that Plex needs.

So uh, how does this work? What's to stop me from sticking my data up there and sharing it with 1000 friends? Where is the trancoding done?

I was a member of a private plex group with about 8TB of media. He was constantly running into problems due to people sharing accounts, causing his server load to become unfeasible.

Transcoding is done in the cloud when required (some containers & encoding formats don't require transcoding, some do). There's a 3 concurrent stream limit when the device needs transcoding, so that might put a hamper on your 1K friends.

I have a pretty large collection of media (double digit TB of ripped blurays and lossless music). I solved that by IP whitelisting access to my Plex port at the router level for my home. All friends who I share this with sign up for their own account, and once I share my library with that account I also set a rule that requires it to be whitelisted.

Because you would have to give your 1000 friends the Plex login to your paid Plex account, and this would likely be noticed and your account suspended.

I don't think that's necessary. They can all have their own logins. Plex allows coarse sharing for free and more fine grained sharing in their paid product.

That's not how Plex works. A library can be shared with any number of users that you invite into your account.

Plex is one of my favorite services. One of those companies that makes it easy for me to donate.

I was really annoyed, though, when they released version 1.0 and removed access to all previous downloads. Turns out, 1.0 (on Debian) was broken and I could no longer FF on my Roku. The forums were filled with people complaining, but they would not make the older, good release available. After a week or two someone provided it to me via dropbox.

You might ask why I didn't have the previous download? Because the way I was building my plex docker container would download the latest one, directly. I removed the previous container before I verified all features were working. And, at that point, I wasn't backing up containers (they are stateless, so why bother?), so I was royally screwed for 2 weeks (in terms of FF).

The fact that they are closed source, and behaved this way. It really soured me on them.

> I removed the previous container before I verified all features were working

I think I found your problem.

Corner case

Yawn, move on

I am going to assume, a lot of people are storing Copyrighted Materials.

1. This essentially allows you to store all your favorite collection, what happens if Google Drive decide to wipe all those out?

2. Why not do this on a NAS?

> 2. Why not do this on a NAS?

NAS boxes capable of running Plex media server are not inexpensive.

this is a failed project - there was a lot of expectation when they initially started with Amazon Cloud Drive..with a technical limitation that they faced with Amazon Cloud Drive - they completely eliminated Amazon Cloud Drive from its storage options..I called it failed, because there is no way, I will pay loads of money to Dropbox or Google for the Terabyte of my Homelab videos.. Amazon Cloud Drive would definitely been an option - that I would consider, since they have a fixed 60$ for unlimited data..

You can mount ACD as a filesystem in Linux and run your own Plex server, I've been doing it successfully for a few months now. I followed the instructions at https://amc.ovh/

EDIT: More up to date instructions at https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...

I've been running Plex in a FreeBSD jail (nas4free): http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/11/20/how-to-install-ple...

If you're a former university student, check and see if your school has switched over to google apps for email. I recently realized I've had a free, unlimited google drive for a while now, just waiting to be used...

You can get unlimited data from Google Drive and Dropbox for about the price of 1TB, you just need to use a business account. This seems to be the main solution for the people I know who are using this.

Dropbox is $100/year for 1TB but $20/month for unlimited. That's more than double.

Google Drive severely limits file download speed, and uploads aren't that great.

This is not their fault really. Economics are out of their control. So are terms of usage of various cloud data providers. Not to mention, none of them have any native way of accessing the storage as a file system (at least on linux). Nothing is unlimited as bargain prices. Amazon's unlimited pricing was neer meant for this, much like cellphone unlimited internet is not meant as a replacement for broadband (at their prices). They'll eventually throttle or just terminate your contract.

not sure why it would be failed because they couldn't use amazon.. i remember reading about some threat of content scanning/copyright violation problem with amazon...

they said that's not true, it was a technical limitation that they couldn't resolve

Why didn't they use S3 or GCS as the backing store? Why do we need upload & sync? Seems like you only need just upload and go.

Most people use Plex for pirated content. If Plex uses S3 or GCS as the backing store, then they are hosting and delivering their users' pirated content and opening themselves up to all kinds of legal problems. If they're just providing a way to stream content from some external storage, they have a lot less liability.

Because Dropbox/GoogleDrive can be set up by the user. Going with S3/GCS would require either Plex host (read: pay for) the storage or the user to set up their own cloud accounts.

I set this up during the Beta and it works reasonably well. Cloud Libraries behave just as Shared Libraries do in the App. I didn't see a restriction on the number of Cloud Libraries you can setup and they show up as available libraries in your Plex App.

So I could see using the cloud server as a way to avoid eating up home server bandwidth if you do a lot of remote streaming. Particularly if your ISP has bandwidth caps. There might also be a performance benefit since cloud storage is faster than a lot of people's upstream connections to the internet.

I'm a huge Plex fan, but I'm really not comfortable using this until it supports encryption.

I would only use this for media where you have the legal rights to copy it.

Google Drive and Dropbox both have extensive history regarding the storage of copyrighted content which basically boils down to storing it is fine, sharing it through the platform is not. This is even in their policies.

I believe the DMCA is the same, there's nothing stopping you from possessing copyrighted content without a license, just the distribution and manufacture of it.

Plex allows sharing though. So it's a fine line. It's probably a small enough userbase, and it's personalized sharing as opposed to general p2p sharing. So it's under the radar. If it goes mainstream, Google/Dropbox will be forced to comply by the studios.

Plex is basically acting as a proxy though, so there's no way for a complainant to know that Google Drive is involved.

If the media were truly encrypted that would make transcoding at the server level essentially impossible. It would have to be decrypted client-side.

that's not even possible.

where do you want to store the encryption key to decrypt the movie and play it? In the cloud as well?

you can't store it in your chromecast or whatever..

Why couldn't you store this in your Plex account, versus on the storage medium?

Everything is routed through Plex's services, seems like you could decouple those two things quite easily while still having full encryption on the cloud storage.

In fact, if Plex really wanted this to succeed, they should have a tool which encrypts the files, synchronizes the files with the cloud provider, and then releases the keys to Plex.

Yea sorry, what i meant was encryption keys should (generally / always) be stored client-side...

encryption is a mute point unless its some sort of end-to-end encrypted thing since they host the computers.

"Moot" point, not "mute" - https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point

Is there a good option for encrypted cloud storage that this can access? Unless you want whoever scanning your stuff and seeing your collection of anime...

This is a pretty good guide for Amazon Cloud drive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/58uhmo/guide_to_using...

ACD no longer works with Plex Cloud.

With this setup you run your own Plex server and mount ACD as a filesystem.

No. Plex doesn't support encryption, the data coming from the cloud providers needs to be plaintext.

Google Drive and Dropbox have shown in the past that they're fine with you storing copyrighted content, you just can't share copyrighted content through their platform.

This is why Dropbox and Google Drive are still supported while Amazon Cloud Drive was removed.

That said, you can still set this up yourself with a VPS, you just need to use rclone's mount feature with encryption or something like encfs.

> Google Drive and Dropbox have shown in the past that they're fine with you storing copyrighted content, you just can't share copyrighted content through their platform.

Is there some kind of reference you can point at to support this pretty wild claim?

Even if true, this seems the kind of informal policy that could change on a whim.

Google Drive TOS: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=1-636...

"Respect copyright laws. Do not share copyrighted content without authorization or provide links to sites where your readers can obtain unauthorized downloads of copyrighted content."

Note the "share", there's no reference to merely storing content.

Dropbox does seem to be "informal" though. They simply say they respond to complaints. I'm not sure how you'd be subjected to a complaint storing data privately though.

Plex are already monitoring everything you have and watch and send that information to their servers for retrieving meta info/thumbnails from third-party APIs they proxy.

It's about the cloud provider monitoring your data. Plex by definition has to see the data to serve it.

Plex the software running on your own hardware playing files on your own storage is a MiTM funneling your data through their servers to publicly accessible third-party APIs. Plex the company does not need to do that to play or catalog your videos.

Plex the cloud software (aka Plex the software on a VM) keeps them out of your private network but will still superfluously send your data from the VM to Plex the company.

I've been using this since day one. It's been a bumpy ride, but the past few weeks it's been working really well.

I actually wish they would add support for HDFS- it's not a bad way to combine lots of somewhat-small (< 2TB) disks into a sizable amount of (seemingly) homogenous storage (without having to be super clever with mount points and hard links and BTRFS and junk like that).

Why bother? just add more directories of content to each library. Plex just merges them all at the library level. I have crap stashed over 5 drives, just plain vanilla USB drives, and plex handles them just fine.

Data protection. HDFS replicates chunks of files across 3 different drives by default. This is configurable, but it's one of the most simple ways to protect your data from drive failures, without the performance penalty of RAID.

yeah, that's fair.

Might want to see if the HDFS NFS Gateway works for this.

https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-dist/ha...

Can't you create a zfs storage pool?

Anyone have any experience with this service yet? Do you have to re-encode your videos? Curious since some MKV's i ripped a while ago are transcoded and can be CPU heavy to play. Anyone know how plex cloud handles this when played on Xbox One app or Mobile phone?

The draw of Plex (cloud or otherwise) is that it handles all that for you. It'll transcode to the correct format and even embed subtitles if you need it to. On the backend it uses ffmpeg so it should support pretty much any format. I think it even supports HEVC.

Just need for supported cloud storage to become affordable i guess...

OneDrive comes with Office365 which is 90 bucks a year when found on sale.. You get 1TB of cloud storage for up to 5 family members and you get Office Pro for up to 5 PCs as well.. not a bad deal in the end.

I have around 8TB on Plex, so that won't work for me :(

well, you could create 5 accounts under the single master and have 5 tb online.. for 90 bucks a year.. just use an account for each service.. movies / tv / whatever :)

This is a massive pain, and also against the TOS. Amazon Cloud Drive is $60/year for unlimited storage.

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